Little Man On Campus

"Certainly I think a lot is biological," Greg's dad says. "The wiring he has allows him to see something one time and then bring it back hours and even days later. That's something you can't teach."

If it helps to have good genes, Greg couldn't have done much better. Dad not only has a master's degree in microbiology, he was an All-American football player at the University of Maryland. After college he worked in research for eight years, including a stint with the Food and Drug Administration, before he went into modeling and business.

His IQ is around 130.

Janet was a speech communications major at Maryland, where she met Bob while she was a cheerleader. She also was a dancer who would go on to model and act and finish in the top 10 of the 1972 Miss USA pageant. Eventually she launched her own performing-arts studio.

Her IQ is in the 140s.

After Greg was born, all of them were in the modeling business for a while, once posing together in an ad for a vacation resort as the happy, impossibly photogenic family they really are.

The Smiths waited 15 years for Greg to come along. Janet lost a baby early in their marriage, and her pregnancy with Greg was rough. In her seventh month, she developed toxemia, and her blood pressure skyrocketed, forcing her to be hospitalized. Doctors delivered the boy three and a half weeks early via Caesarean section.

He was perfectly healthy.

But when Greg was 2, there was another scare. Janet, young and otherwise abundantly healthy, with no known risk factors and no family history to warn her, found a lump high in her chest and was diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of breast cancer.

"I didn't know if I would live," she says. "My decision and Bob's decision was that I was going to take the harshest medicine they could give me, and take as many treatments as they could give me, as I could physically stand, to cure myself, because I had a 2-year-old child. I wanted to be here for Greg. I wanted Greg to have me as his mother.''

She kept a journal during her treatment, writing letters to the boy she hoped she would get to see grow up, letters she hoped would never be delivered. It's your 16th birthday, she said, and as you're reading this book I just want you to know how much I love you.

The chemotherapy and radiation left her violently ill. It affected her skin, her teeth, her vision, her hair, her stomach. It blurred her memory. It made her feel she could not get warm, no matter what the temperature was or how much she bundled up. Since the anti-nausea medicine left her too groggy to care for Greg - and because Bob still had to go to work - she refused to take it.

"I had lost myself," she says. "You just get to the point where the medicine is so strong you don't know if you can keep going."

One day that summer, she curled up on a lounge chair in the back yard, trying to soak up some warmth from the sun. Greg toddled out and knelt down beside her.

"I realized, looking at him, that I had to be strong enough," she says. "I didn't want that to be his last memory of me."

Last year she passed the five-year milestone in her recovery, the point at which a cancer patient is considered cured.

THEY NEVER SPOKE baby-talk to Greg, and they never yelled at him. Discipline - on those three or four occasions in his life when he did something he shouldn't have, such as going into a neighbor's yard without permission - consisted of a casual suggestion that he change his behavior. At worst, he got a timeout.

If Greg showed an interest in something, his parents immediately embraced it. In his dinosaur phase, for instance, they bought him books on dinosaurs, videos on dinosaurs, dinosaur toys. They took him to museums with dinosaur exhibits.

"He's just been a pure joy to us ever since he was born," his dad says.

If anything pained them, it was the shortsightedness of the adults who were never sure what to do with Greg in school.

In kindergarten, for instance, when he was already reading entire books, Greg sat patiently, cooperatively, through The Alphabet Song. Hmmm, he figured, must be some sort of review.

They began looking at schools - both public and private - from Connecticut to Florida that would offer Greg what he needed. They kept looking for six months. Everyone talked about enrichment rather than advancement. They only wanted to give him extra work.

"We weren't looking for more work for Greg," Janet says. "We were looking for work that would challenge him, something that would keep him interested in school, not just bogged down."